


Violet & Clementine

by gala_apples



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Grand Theft Auto Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 04:34:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14156835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gala_apples/pseuds/gala_apples
Summary: Ryan moves to Los Santos at seventeen with a 672 on his skin. He hasn't a clue what it means but he's going to figure it out.





	Violet & Clementine

**Author's Note:**

> This fic isn't super graphic, but it contains GTA-typical violence. Also, I wouldn't say that this fic is Ray bashing, but it does acknowledge that he left them.

Maybe the number etched into Ryan’s skin is the amount of times he hears a song, and his soulmate is a DJ he snaps at in a bar one night. Maybe it's the amount he’ll eat a specific food, and he meets her when the pen he’s signing his credit card slip with dies and a patron at the next table over helpfully offers a pen from her purse. Maybe it's the number of people he makes small talk with on public transit, and a handsome man with his heart on his sleeve will make Ryan miss his stop so they can keep talking. Whatever his soulnumber means, he knows it's something better done in a big city than in a town in Georgia. Anywhere is better than his birth home.

It doesn't take long before shit gets fucked in Los Santos. 

It's not that he’s one of a hundred thousand homeless teenagers in America. In any other major city, sure. But Los Santos is practically rolling put the red carpet for teenagers too sure of their immortality to turn down the overnight shift at the gas station, or the convenience store, or, in his case, the adult toy store. There are a surprising number of 24/7 porn and toy stores in Los Santos. Unlike unfortunate teens in New York, or Chicago, Ryan has a job, he has an apartment, he has friends in the form of neighbours who do meth and invite him over on occasion. He doesn’t partake, they’re not exactly keen on sharing their stash, but they can be interesting to talk to.

Where things go wrong is when he finds out one of the ranges of dildo are packed with cocaine. After pondering it for a while Ryan steals a crate to sell for extra money. It doesn't go well. His manager ends up tracking him down and Ryan just barely saves himself. It’s something out of a cop drama on prime time; he tackles the guy and gets the gun out of his hand. Ryan's not even eighteen when he shoots a man in the head. A man who he'd been arguing with about the merits of Trey Parker and Matt Stone the last time he saw him.

He could move back home. The argument could be made that in buttfuck Georgia he never would have had this happen to him. But he never would have had that opportunity to offload some coke either, and what if 672 is the number of dollar bills he gets from street dealing? Given the prospect of true love, and intense adrenaline pumping adventures, Ryan just can’t move back in to his parents house.

At eighteen he kills his methy neighbours. They sketch out, they've taken bad shit and it’s the only way to not get stabbed in the face by the Mrs, while Mr tries to light the room on fire. His gun only has three bullets left in it, and anyone who watches the news, and sees the Most Wanted billboards change weekly knows that three won't be enough.

The fourth person he kills is some asshole who tries to mug him. Judging by the last expression the mugger makes, he half expected things to go down this way. Ryan knows better than to leave the body on the sidewalk. He’s lucky to have not been particularly associated with the deaths on his hands already, but at some point that luck will end. Good thing there’s a lot of open land on the outskirts of Los Santos. A shallow grave and a hungry coyote and all his problems are solved.

He gets caught anyway, despite his precautions. He gets caught by a guy who gets out of the car to piss only to find a two foot deep hole, a growing mound of dirt, a guy with blisters from the shovel, and a corpse. Cue Los Santos style morality: instead of getting out his phone and calling the cops, or running away, scared that he'll be next, the guy decides to blackmail him. Ryan has to kill someone for him or the gigs of video he took over the hour of completing the burial will be emailed to the cops. Sure the LSPD don't try hard to do their job, but with something dropped in their laps like that, they have to follow up, just for the easy credit. 

Ryan makes the obvious choice. He teaches himself via the internet how to break into a house and then he waits in the closet ‘til he can shoot the target. Once. Or twice. Or a dozen times in the gut. What? He's very frustrated by the situation. 

Except it doesn't stop there. The blackmailer shows up at his house. He's arrogant enough to think Ryan knows his name, like he's some kind of legend. Gavin Free, or The Gavino. Fuck off.

This time he has an offer. Ryan’s supposed to surveil some guy and if it turns out he's a scumbag he’s to kill him. It's a lot of money. Ryan wouldn't have to work for years. He's never going to get an inheritance from Mom or Dad, but this bundle he can put away for a rainy day. Ryan says he'll take the job, knowing in his head he’s not even going to blink at the guy. 

Except, after he’s bought himself a motorcycle he gets curious. Who is this guy that Gavin wants dead? He rips through the highway, engine roaring, until he's at the guy's house, and starts spying. What he sees makes Ryan suspicious enough to decide to break in. There’s just something _off_ about the man. When he slips in in the middle of the night and checks his computer, it’s full of vile, horrifying trash. Motherfucker likes kids. Ryan happily storms into the man's bedroom and breaks his legs and arms, then slices open his belly so he'll die slow, unable to move. It feels warm and good to kill him. Like the right, virtuous thing is murder.

Fueled on that feeling, Ryan maybe starts listening to street rumor. It takes a while, but after a few false leads he figures out where The Gavino might work. The location makes sense. It’s a mixed use building, in that it’s supposed to be a luxury apartment complex, but at least half the occupants run their various businesses out of shell apartments. 

He sits in the lobby, perched on the thin edge of a planter. There’s no need to do anything else. It’s not a question of if there’s surveillance at The Madison Arms. There is. There’s more than that, besides. Even at eight at night, the lobby is full of rushing people coming and going. Some of the most dangerous people in the world live in this building but a brave Girl Scout would make hundreds selling cookies. Ryan has no doubt a handful of the crowd are mercenaries dressed fine to blend in who’d kill him for doing the wrong thing. Ryan can’t guess if Gavin is a man with a mercenary, but if he does work here, Ryan is sure he’ll have his own camera feed. No way he doesn't protect his lair. 

Ryan reasons right, Gavin comes down from whatever floor he was on. Ryan keeps his request short, succinct. “Give me another person. A shitrag like him.”

Gavin explains there's sadly no shortage. He doesn't look all that sad. Maybe he enjoys righteous death as much as Ryan now knows he does. 

It’s not an everyday thing. Ryan doesn't wake up, scratch his balls, shower and shave, and kill someone. It's not a ‘on Tuesday I kill’ thing either. Sometimes, just sometimes, Ryan gets an email, the name of someone who needs to be nuclear blasted off the face of the planet. Gavin never calls, never drops off a letter. Always emails. At first Ryan does his due diligence, his own research on the names given. After a while the intense study reduces to a cursory look through their home. Gavin Free is good at what he does, which from what Ryan can tell is mostly stalking people online. There’s not a single time that Ryan finds something proving Gavin wrong. His facts are immutable.

What does change over time is Ryan’s relationship to the man. Gavin starts coming to visit after jobs get done, video game in hand, and with designer soda after he finds out Ryan doesn’t drink. He’s a pretty exasperating man, but part of Ryan enjoys someone caring enough to try to annoy him. It’s the closest to friend or decent family he's gotten in Los Santos.

A man in a suit comes into Ryan's life. He comes into his living room too, alongside Gav. As with everyone you meet, there’s that brief introductory pause where both sides try to calculate if they've done anything their soulmate number amount of times, and now they're finally together. It’s an imprecise method, but standard. Ryan's not an obsessive, tallying every instant of everything he does, but he cares. He wants to meet him or her, the person destiny has declared he’ll love like no other. But it's not this guy. This _Geoff_. He's just a guy who’s been running with two other people -Gavin and apparently a woman named Jack- and wants Ryan to join them. Ryan passes the first time, but allows Geoff to put in a name for a job.

He doesn’t say no the tenth time Geoff asks. Ryan hangs out with the trio more nights than he doesn’t. He kills the evil of the city on their behalf. He kills their enemies for them. How does officially joining really affect anything?

It's when Ray joins that they start doing heists. It's easier to physically break in somewhere when you know a man with one hundred percent aim is on the roof behind you.

Michael's supposed to be for just one job. They need explosives and he’s the best, according to Gavin’s cyber-stalking. Jack could probably fake it, but accuracy is important for this heist. Michael stays because he's hilarious and everyone likes him.

They run like that for a long time. Years. On occasion one of them suggests everyone getting their own places, moving out of the stupid huge mansion they got after their first bank robbery, but it never happens. Maybe it's because the other five passive aggressively refuse to help pack and transport boxes. Maybe it's because they live found family style where any girlfriends or boyfriends -or in Geoff's case a pretty sweet nbfriend- get absorbed and move in, but no one moves out. Whatever the root cause, they plot and steal and kill and live for years without much change.

And then one day Ray says he's leaving. In one of what is the most excruciating conversations Ryan’s ever had he flat out says he’s leaving. He has to, because if he just left they'd assume the worst, kidnapping. Correction. They'd assume the second worst, because the worst is obviously one of the crew, one of their people in arms, declaring he doesn't give a fuck anymore.

It affects the heists, because of course it does. No one wants to do them when there's no laconic voice on the comms, mocking the cops, civilians, and rivals he's about to shoot from a thousand yards away. They can't let it all go, refuse to disband completely and be alone, but for the time being at least, they can't heist. So they branch out. Become empire builders. Gone is the mansion, they have penthouses across the city. There's a wave of new members, Geoff apparently deciding if he floods them in overwhelmingly it'll be impossible to develop feelings for any of the strangers. 

He's proven wrong the first time Michael meets Lindsay. It's Michael's seventh sourced batch of potassium picrate. It's Lindsay’s three thousandth and fifty third piece of doublemint gum. It's not romantic, because it's so funny. Or maybe that's what makes it romantic, that they've found love in such a ridiculous situation.

Lindsay comes in hot about some trivia she got wrong and eventually Michael snaps and starts yelling that he doesn’t care, nobody fuckin’ cares. She starts yelling back. They're so noisy it draws people, so there’s a crowd when Lindsay remembers her food counter app on her phone, telling her this morning she was one away. She blurts out her number and then says “I'm not trying to gaslight you but could your number have triggered? Because I’ve talked to like two or three other people since I started chewing this piece and they are way less my type.”

Michael grabs his arm, like his number is prickling, like a Death Eater tattoo. “That's my seventh fucking container of potassium picrate!”

From that point it's a losing battle. They get to know Trevor, Alfredo, Steffie. The family restructures. Instead of codependent metaphorical reliant babies, it's a family with teenagers. Close, strong relationships, but with autonomy. When Geoff sends someone new out with one of the original five, there's an expectation of them being cool. FAHC is an empire, and like calls to like. At least until they betray you and you have to kill them. Ray destroyed any last remnants of nativity they’d had left about long term trust.

But unless Ryan is betrayed, he's happy to meet this new guy, Rimmy Tim, for this job. Ryan's task is shoot a plane out of the sky. Rimmy's job -apparently the top fighter in their underground fighting ring, if Geoff and Gavin are to be believed- is to keep any person who might wish to interfere away from Ryan.

The job goes well. Ryan’s focus constricts as he holds his rocket launcher, narrows until the only things left in the world are the machinery and the plane above him. At the precise moment needed, he sets it off. The wing blows off and there’s a red crackle and a black plume. The best colour combo ever, according to Michael. There's a deafening roar as it crashes, and a vibration that might be souls being forced out of their bodies because when Ryan comes to there's a ring of corpses at his feet.

He doesn't realize until that night. The news is reporting The Vagabond's death count and the fresh faced news anchor figures it's over six hundred, since over four hundred people died on the plane. He's got blood on his hands? Shit, how about he's got blood smeared on every cell in his body. They're not even accurate. There are the early few, the pre-Vagabond stuff. They have to still count, his same hands did it, custom motorcycle gloves or not. Somehow they missed the bus hijacking. Not to mention the Zikanos job. If Ryan's math is right he's more like at... oh. Oh shit. 

He's more like at 670.

That has to be it, right? Two more and he's set. A soulmate. Loved for life. Ryan gets off the couch, puts his shoes on, and makes his way to the condo where they make and go over plans. It's Geoff and Lindsay and Trevor's domain, but that's the point. Presuming he doesn't kill someone for buying the last sesame seed bagel in HEB, the next two deaths will be on logistical orders. The more information he's got the better. 

He's up for hours, every light turned on so brightly he doesn’t notice when the sun rises. Why put any attention to the outside world when he could be concentrating on reading every scrap of information about the next few heists, trying to figure out who might be in the room at the time they’re committed. Ryan’s best bet is a civilian. If it's another criminal, an opposing gang member, it might be difficult finding their commonalities. Same goes for if they're a cop. With a civilian Ryan can mold him or her in his image, introduce them to things. If they truly abhor crime they wouldn't be living in Los Santos. He's awake so long he's still up when Trevor walks in with a cup of coffee and turns the news on. Trevor notes with satisfaction that the news is still headlining with FAHC. Specifically the bombing claiming two more lives, people in the hospital succumbing. And that means he's hit his number.

“Holy shit. I gotta go.”

He can’t do this on the phone. If he texts Rimmy Tim, even to ask where he is, the guy might be suspicious. Ryan has spent his life working towards being a man ready for his number and his soulmate. He's not fucking this up by using the wrong approach on someone he can't anticipate. So instead he goes to Gavin. It's a different kind of suspicious. He knows the nosy blond bastard will be asking questions in the future, when he feels they can best be sprung as a trap. Ryan grimly assigns that as future-him’s problem and gets the location from Gavin's trackers.

Rimmy- well, might as well call him by his non-crew name, now, if they’re going to be together for the next sixty years. _Jeremy_ is at the golf course. Ryan doesn't know why, apart from how there can be deals to be made with the wealthy in the places the peasants can't touch. Not that he seems to fit in the general class and caliber here. Sure the orange and purple trousers and polo almost fit in with all the chevrons and polka dots and pinstripes in bright colours, but the similarly orange and purple hair stand out in a sea of silver-grey. 

Jeremy doesn’t seem blown away by Ryan showing up out of the blue. It’s a clue towards if he knows their numbers have been met. That, or maybe Gavin ratted him out as being on the prowl. Gavin has a fond spot for Lil Tim. The man Jeremy's playing with doesn't respond to Ryan’s growled ‘get out’, so Ryan tries again with the persuasion of a SNS pistol. Funny enough, it works that time. Old Guy stumbles and trips his way into the golf cart, and makes a beeline for the hills. Once he gets to the office there will be security on the way, but they should have a few minutes. Golf carts aren’t particularly known for their speed.

Jeremy sighs at him, the moment they’re alone. “Come on buddy. I had something going there.”

Suddenly all thoughts of carefully reading the situation and the man in front of him go out of his head. “Six hundred seventy two.”

“What?”

“That's me. Six hundred seventy two. And with the plane job-”

“Six hundred and seventy two. Shit. Wow. Do you know what Alfredo's number is?”

Ryan’s confused. “What?”

“It was good working with you. You're funny as shit and I want to fight you, in a good way.” Ryan knows what he means. Affectionate aggression is sort of a staple of all his friends. “But I did a lot of shit yesterday, and my number is nine thousand, seven seventy seven. I’ve guessed for a while that it was gonna be number of days alive. Thing is? That's twenty four hours worth of people. I figured out my number leaves me open for poly around the same time I figured out the day thing. A lot of the people I talked to yesterday have been ruled out, but I gotta ask. You know anything about The Sauce? Did _you_ see him last night?”

This is not how Ryan pictured this going. Maybe it was never going to be as emotionally fraught and destined as rom com movies make soul mates meeting out to be, but he didn't plan for analytical. But there are two truths here and Ryan thinks he owes it to fate to say them both. “No, I didn't. I blew up the plane with you then went home. But Alfredo is hot, and I get along with him. If you want to try a poly thing as we get to know each other I'm okay with it.”

Jeremy’s wide smile is payment enough for turning his back on his elaborate hypotheticals. To hell with rom com tropes. There was never going to be a movie in a theatre about two assassins falling in love anyway. Ryan’s spent his whole life, made a lot of dark choices to facilitate being the kind of man who could attract the soulmate he wants. He is who he is, now, and that’s given him Jeremy. If he has to follow the mind bending logic of rejecting a soulnumber’s power in order to get his soulmate, well, so be it. It’s just another dark choice, and Ryan is good at those.


End file.
